translated from Spanish: They expect it to be ready for this year: U.S. company tests for Covid-19 in Australia

A US biotechnology company began injecting a coronavirus vaccine in Australia Tuesday, hoping to have it ready for widespread use this year. In the first phase of the trial, 131 volunteers will test the safety of the vaccine and look for the first indications of its effectiveness, said physician Gregory Glenn, principal researcher of the company Novavax.Around a dozen experimental vaccines are in the initial phase of testing or are about to start them, mainly in China, the United States and Europe. At the moment it is unclear whether any of the candidates in the end will prove safe and effective, but many vaccines work in different forms, and are manufactured with different technologies, increasing the likelihood that at least one will succeed.” We’re doing dosages and the vaccine at the same time predicting that we’ll be able to show that it’s working and that we’ll be able to start distributing it by the end of the year,” Glenn said during a virtual press conference in Melbourne from Novavax’s Maryland headquarters.Animal testing has said that the vaccine is effective with small doses. Novavax could manufacture at least 100 million doses this year and 1.5 billion by 2021, Glenn reported.He added that since March, the production of the vaccine, called NVX-CoV2373, was intensified following a $388 million investment by the Coalition for Innovation in Epidemic Preparedness, based in Noruega.Se the results of the first phase of clinical trials in Melbourne and Brisbane are expected to be unveiled in July Novavax said. After that, thousands of candidates from several countries would get involved in the second phase. The trial began with six volunteers who were injected with the potential vaccine in Melbourne on Tuesday, said Paul Griffin, an infectious disease expert for Australian collaborator Nucleus Network.La most experimental vaccines in process aim to train the immune system to recognize the spike proteins that extend from the surface of the coronavirus, apprehending the body to react if it became exposed to the actual virus. Some of the candidates are made using only the genetic code for that protein, and others use a harmless virus to provide the information. Some of the other vaccine projects follow the traditional style, using full dead viruses. Novavax adds a new class to that list, known as a recombinant vaccine. The company used genetic engineering to grow safe copies of coronavirus protein into insect cells in a lab. Scientists extracted and purified the protein, and packed it into virus-sized nanoparticles.” The way we make a vaccine is that we never touch the virus,” Novavax told The Associated Press last month, but ultimately, “for the immune system it looks the same as a virus.”

Original source in Spanish